I’ve been having fun recently taking some of the ideas around ‘Doing Development Differently’ and applying them to INGOs, building on the post I wrote last year on ‘You can’t take a supertanker white-water rafting’. The Exam Question is: Given complexity, systems thinking and the...

Never make predictions, especially about the future: 42 predictions by futurologists from c1960 (some correct – driverless cars) [h/t Tim Harford] Flurry of posts on life and love in the aid biz: How not to get a job in development. Some painful examples of pressing the...

This post by tax campaigner Christian Hallum (@ChrHallum) also appeared on the Eurodad blog. Last Saturday a landmark decision was taken when the African Union, made up of 54 African Heads of State, adopted the report of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows (IFF)....

Skating on thin ice is an occupational hazard in my job, but it was really cracking underfoot at a recent Chatham House Rules roundtable on ‘debt crisis prevention in developing countries’. The only way to survive is to stay quiet, nod and look thoughtful when people refer to...

I wrote this post for the LSE’s International Development Department blog There’s a character in a Moliere play who is surprised and delighted to learn that he has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. I thought of him a couple of weeks into my new role as a...

Ageing is one of those development issues that is only going to get bigger. A new report from Age International pulls together all the killer facts and infographics you should need to be convinced, and lots of eminent talking heads (Margaret Chan, Richard Jolly, Mary Robinson...

This week’s displacement-activity selection from the best of the twitterstream Lots of traffic about the need to destigmatize mental illness, but what really got to me was this reinterpretation of Winnie the Pooh. Is nothing sacred? Extraordinary takedown of Winston Churchill (by...

At least in economic terms, migration appears to be some kind of developmental wonder-drug. Remittances from migrants to developing countries are now running at some three times the volume of aid, and barely faltered during the 2008-9 financial crisis (see graph). The Wor...

Vanita Suneja, Oxfam India’s Economic Justice Lead, argues that India can’t progress until it tackles rural poverty More than 800 million of India’s 1.25 billion people live in the countryside. One quarter of rural India’s population is below the official poverty line...

About

This is a conversational blog written and maintained by Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB and author of ‘From Poverty to Power’.
This personal reflection is not intended as a comprehensive statement of Oxfam's agreed policies.